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The White Tiger: A Novel (Man Booker Prize) |  | Author: Aravind Adiga
Publisher: Free Press
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Rating:  339 reviews
Sales Rank: 1957
Media: Paperback
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.7
ISBN: 1416562605
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.92
EAN: 9781416562603
ASIN: 1416562605
Publication Date: October 14, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Introducing a major literary talent, The White Tiger offers a story of coruscating wit, blistering suspense, and questionable morality, told by the most volatile, captivating, and utterly inimitable narrator that this millennium has yet seen.Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, by the scattered light of a preposterous chandelier, Balram tells us the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life -- having nothing but his own wits to help him along. Born in the dark heart of India, Balram gets a break when he is hired as a driver for his village's wealthiest man, two house Pomeranians (Puddles and Cuddles), and the rich man's (very unlucky) son. From behind the wheel of their Honda City car, Balram's new world is a revelation. While his peers flip through the pages of Murder Weekly ("Love -- Rape -- Revenge!"), barter for girls, drink liquor (Thunderbolt), and perpetuate the Great Rooster Coop of Indian society, Balram watches his employers bribe foreign ministers for tax breaks, barter for girls, drink liquor (single-malt whiskey), and play their own role in the Rooster Coop. Balram learns how to siphon gas, deal with corrupt mechanics, and refill and resell Johnnie Walker Black Label bottles (all but one). He also finds a way out of the Coop that no one else inside it can perceive. Balram's eyes penetrate India as few outsiders can: the cockroaches and the call centers; the prostitutes and the worshippers; the ancient and Internet cultures; the water buffalo and, trapped in so many kinds of cages that escape is (almost) impossible, the white tiger. And with a charisma as undeniable as it is unexpected, Balram teaches us that religion doesn't create virtue, and money doesn't solve every problem -- but decency can still be found in a corrupt world, and you can get what you want out of life if you eavesdrop on the right conversations. Sold in sixteen countries around the world, The White Tiger recalls The Death of Vishnu and Bangkok 8 in ambition, scope, and narrative genius, with a mischief and personality all its own. Amoral, irreverent, deeply endearing, and utterly contemporary, this novel is an international publishing sensation -- and a startling, provocative debut.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 339
 White Tiger August 27, 2010
A. BORNER (CT)
It was hard to put down...I'm glad I took it with me on my vacation. It should open your eyes to a whole new world, a different perspective of India and its daily life. Very well written and certainly deserving of the Man Booker Prize.
A White Tiger in an Indian Jungle August 24, 2010
Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Balram Halwai was nicknamed the White Tiger by the inspector of a so-called school because, alone in the class, he could read and answer a few questions, and he was therefore compared by the inspector to the rarest of animals in a jungle. And a jungle is portrayed in the rest of the book.
When it opens, Balram is living in Bangalore. He has read that Wen Jiabao, the Chinese Prime Minister, is about to visit that city and would like to meet some Indian entrepreneurs to hear the story of their success. The novel takes the form of a letter from Balram to Wen Jiabao: India has thousands of entrepreneurs of whom Balram is one, and he will tell Wen his life story.
This begins in a dirt-poor village whose people are bled dry by brutally extortionate landowners. We know from the start that the police are after Balram now, so we can assume that his entrepreneurial progress from that start will not be a law-abiding one. The way he tells the story, it is only with alertness, cunning, obsequiousness and ultimately crime that you can you pull yourself up from the bottom in a society where bribery, often corruption and extortion for services not rendered, at times backed by crude violence, are rampant at every level: schoolmasters, landlords, businessmen, police and of course politicians. "You eat - or get eaten up". And connections are absolutely essential.
Balram has left his village for a near-by town in search of work, and there he is employed as a humble driver and general household servant (but that is already a big step up) by a big noise simply because he comes from the same village as the latter. Then Mr Ashok, the son of the big noise, becomes his patron and takes him with him to Delhi. Ashok is a weak and foolish man; but he is a benign, almost fatherly employer. And Balram's resentment of the difference of wealth and status between them grows. He has already reflected that the oppressed classes have servility bred into them: they may cheat their masters in petty ways, but it does not occur to them to do anything dramatic - he sees that tendency in himself. And now there is a scene in which he goes to a zoo and sees a white tiger pace up and down, trapped behind his bars of his cage; at about the same time there is the unexpected victory of a socialist politician in an election. In a slightly surrealistic chapter, Balram's seething feelings drive him to break free and to commit the crime for which the police are looking for him.
The police don't find him, and he makes his way to Bangalore where he adopts a new identity and employs the usual corrupt means to set up his own prosperous business. He knows that one day the police may catch up with him and that bribery might then avail him nothing; but "I'll say it was all worthwhile to know, just for a day, just for an hour, just for a minute, what it means not to be a servant."
The story is told with verve, cynical humour and sharp observations of many aspects of Indian life. For all Balram's guile and worse, we sympathize with his resentment of the sleazy, grindingly unjust and cruel society in which he has to live and make his way.
Good book; GREAT performance August 14, 2010
Jersey Reader (Mahwah, NJ)
Enough has been written below about the book that I will only offer this - The dark turn at the end of the book caught me off-guard and left me unsatisfied. To that point, I was enjoying it quite a bit.
However, good the author was though, the reader was what made me continue. Kerry Shale does a great job of providing inflection, comic timing, modulation and other sound effects that turn this into a performance as opposed to simply a recitation. All hail Mr. Shale and I will go seek out other books you have performed and hope to enjoy them as much as I did this one.
Walking a Mile in Another Man's Shoes August 4, 2010
Loves the View (Hawaii)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
By way of giving advice to the Chinese Premier in a series of letters, Bahram Halwai seeks to show him how entrepreneurship and democracy, which are extolled in the west, play out in India. Halwai recounts his own experiences which give readers insight into the life, thoughts and feelings that most likely characterize the many caught in the lower rungs in India's caste and economic systems.
From the "Darkness" where the work and meager resources of its indigent residents have been extracted by a ruthless family, Halwai raises himself up to Bangalore. His father was a rickshaw puller; he becomes a driver to the very family that controls the destiny of the poor in this town, and later an entrepreneur.
Halwai sees the poor as living in a Rooster Coop, kept there by a code of ethics and behavior that allows them to be the world's best servants. Jobs are scarce and they must grovel and be beyond reproach in honesty and loyalty to those who play by different rules. He shows that even the more enlightened elite will easily trade off a servant who has fully demonstrated his role-required code.
Adiga's India shows the scramble for limited resources. Democracy is manipulated by money at the top and this ethos filters down through the entire system.
It appears that this is a first novel, winning the Booker prize right out of the gate. I see there is a second, Between the Assassinations, with equally high Amazon reviewer scores. The first person narration of this is reminiscent of Mohsid Hamid's two excellent novels, Moth Smoke: A Novel and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I hope Adiga is more prolific.
The Darkness and the Light August 3, 2010
John Sollami (Stamford, CT)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Mother India: land of the exotic, land of the sublime; a spiritual haven; a place to find inner peace. Have you been, Western seeker? All I can say is read this book first, but still you will not understand the Darkness and the Light, so truly presented by this acute observer, Arawad Adiga, who has written such a startlingly original piece of fiction. I say fiction, but the writer himself has said this fiction is based on observed facts, people he has known, and the state of affairs in India itself.
This book has a voice, the voice of the lowly village boy who harbors a rare brilliance, a burning sense of his own worth, and the awful injustice that is his life in the Darkness. Yet, this story could have taken place in any Central American city or any African city or any third-world country: it's the story of poor people ensnared, servants of the rich who are always one step ahead of them; greedy people; inhuman people; well-intended people who are too weak to fight the ubiquitous corrupt system and so become part of it.
This is an extraordinary work, a nightmarish work that shows the horrors of Indian poverty and what it takes to fight the Darkness and come to the Light. I know this work is fiction, but everything about it is extremely plausible. As a work of literature, it mimicks reality so sharply, presenting it in a garish, cruel, and biting light, that the reader is changed, cannot forget it, and is cut open by its nasty edges. Did I "enjoy" it? As an original read, yes, but as a dark and terrible reminder of what the world is like for millions of people, no. It was disturbing as hell, to say the least.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 339
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